Built on Ruby on Rails, Fedena is an open source school or campus management system meant as a solution for management-related issues at schools. These include student databases, activity calendars, staff databases, etc. The project is aimed at lowering technical costs for schools while providing them with the software needed to manage their needs efficiently.
Fedena was built and is maintained and coordinated by Foradian Technologies, a Mangalore, India company. The concept began in 2008.
The site itself is simple and functions as an ERP for schools. Most small campuses, private schools, and so forth will likely find something useful with Fedena, but the app is basically a beta offering that doesn’t have full functionality everywhere you’d expect. It is free, however, and it appears Foradian plans to monetize it through value added services like phone support, online hosting for schools that don’t have their own, and possibly through some premium offers forthcoming.
The site has a relatively active community, for being so new to the Web. Message boards with information relating to education, using the software, technical questions, etc. can be found there.
Overall, I would say that this is a good idea and probably something for which there is some need. The question is whether this is really the solution for it. At this stage, I’d have to honestly say that it isn’t because it still appears very much to be in its infancy. Much of the website links to “Coming Soon” pages with little facts and the login process and approval appears manual.
Worth looking at and maybe useful to very small institutions or related groups, but for the most part it’s probably going to need some time to get up to enough functionality to really be useful for most.
